usepackagelfaq2The 3 Project 19951999
Frank Mittelbach and
Chris Rowley12 January 1999GELLMU Edition
prepared by W. F. Hammond
17 January 2001
This article describes the motivation, achievements and future of
the 3 Project, which was established to produce a new version
of , the widelyused and highlyacclaimed document
preparation system It also describes how you can help us to
achieve our aimsFor Archive maintainers, Authors, Publishers and
Distributors:
The project team request that, whenever possible, you include this
article in any of the following:
Books about and Instructions for authors on using The printed documentation of CDROM collections that contain
Online collections that include a significant proportion of
documents encoded in .
Outline
The purposes of the 3 system can be summarized thus: it will
greatly increase the range of documents which can be processed; and it
will provide a flexible interface for typographic designers to easily
specify the formatting of a class of documents
The 3 Project Team is a small group of volunteers whose aim is
to produce this major new document processing system based on the
principles pioneered by Leslie Lamport in the current
The major visible work of the team before 1997 was the development of
the current standard version of This was first
released in 1994 and has since then been actively maintained and
enhanced by extensions to that core system They will continue to
develop and maintain this system, releasing updated versions every six
months and recording these activities in the bugs database
(see below)
Although may be distributed freely, the production and
maintenance of the system does require expenditure of reasonably large
sums of money The 3 Project Fund has therefore been set up to
channel money into this work We know that some users are
aware of this fund as they have already contributed to itmany
thanks to all of them If you want to know more about how you can
help the project, see Page fundand thanks in advance for
your generosity in the futureBackground
With , Knuth designed a formatting system that is able to
produce a large range of documents typeset to extremely high quality
standards. For various reasons (e.g. quality, portability, stability
and availability) spread very rapidly and can nowadays be best
described as a worldwide de facto standard for high quality
typesetting. Its use is particularly common in specialized areas, such
as technical documents of various kinds, and for multilingual
requirements
The system is fully programmable. This allows the development
of highlevel user interfaces whose input is processed by 's
interpreter to produce lowlevel typesetting instructions; these are
input to 's typesetting engine which outputs the format of each
page in a deviceindependent pagedescription language The
system is such an interface; it was designed to support the needs of
long documents such as textbooks and manuals. It separates content and
form as much as possible by providing the user with a generic (i.e.
logical rather than visual) markup interface; this is combined with
style sheets which specify the formatting
Recent years have shown that the concepts and approach of are
now widely accepted. Indeed, has become the standard method
of communicating and publishing documents in many academic
disciplines This has led to many publishers accepting
source for articles and books; and the American Mathematical Society
now provides a package making the features of AMSTeX
available to all users of Its use has also spread into many
other commercial and industrial environments, where the technical
qualities of together with the concepts of are
considered a powerful combination of great importance to such areas as
corporate documentation and publishing This has also extended to
online publishing using, for example, PDF output incorporating
hypertext and other active areas
With the spreading use of SGMLcompliant systems (e.g. Webbased
publishing using HTML or XML) again is a common choice as
the formatting engine for high quality typeset output: a widely used
such system is The Publisher from ArborText, whilst a more
recent development is the objectoriented document editor Grif The
latter is used for document processing in a wide range of industrial
applications; it has also been adopted by the Euromath consortium as
the basis of their mathematician's workbench, one of the most advanced
of the emerging projectoriented user environments Typeset output
from SGMLcoded documents in these systems is obtained by
translation into , which will therefore soon also be a natural
choice for the output of DSSSLcompliant systems
Because a typical SGML Document Type Definition (DTD) uses concepts
similar to those of , the formatting is often implemented by
simply mapping document elements to constructs rather than
directly to `raw '
This enables the
sophisticated analytical techniques built into the
software to be exploited; and it avoids the need to program in Motivation
This increase in the range of applications of has highlighted
certain limitations of the current system, both for authors of
documents and for designers of formatting styles
In addition to the need to extend the variety of classes of document
which can be processed by , substantial enhancements are
necessary in, at least, the following areas:
the command syntax (attributes, short references, etc);
the layout specification interface (style design);
the level of robustness (error recovery, omitted tags);
the extendibility (package interface);
the layout specification of tabular material;
the specification and inclusion of graphical material;
the positioning of floating material, and other aspects of page
layout;
the requirements of hypertext systems
Further analysis of these deficiencies has shown that some of the
problems are to be found in 's internal concepts and design
This project to produce a new version therefore involves thorough
research into the challenges posed by new applications and by the use
of as a formatter for a wide range of documents, e.g.SGML
documents; online PDF documents with hypertext links
This will result in a major reimplementation of large parts of the
system Some of the results of such rethinking of the fundamentals
are already available in Standard , notably in the following
areas:
Font declaration and selection;
Font and glyph handling within mathematical formulas;
Handling multiple font glyph encodings within a document;
Allowing multiple input character encodings within a document;
A uniform interface for graphics inclusion;
Support for coloured text;
Building and interfacing new classes and extension packagesDescription
The strengths of the present version of are
as follows:
excellent standard of typesetting for text, technical
formulas
and tabular material;
separation of generic markup from visual formatting;
ease of use for authors;
portability of documents over a wide range of platforms;
adaptability to many languages;
widespread and free availability;
reliable support and maintenance by the 3 project team
These will be preserved and in many cases greatly enhanced by the new
version which is being developed to fulfill the following requirements
It will provide a syntax that allows highly automated translation
from popular SGML DTDs into document classes (these
will be provided as standard with the new version)
The syntax of the new userinterface will, for example,
support the SGML concepts of `entity', `attribute' and `short
reference' in such a way that these can be directly linked to the
corresponding SGML features
It will support hypertext links and other features required for
online structured documents using, for example, HTML and XML
It will provide a straightforward styledesigner interface to support
both the specification of a wide variety of typographic requirements
and the linking of entities in the generic markup of a document to
the desired formatting These two parts of the design process will
be clearly separated so that it is possible to specify different
layouts for the same DTD
The language and syntax of this interface will be as natural as
possible for a typographic designer As a result, this language
could easily be interfaced to a visuallyoriented, menudriven
specification system
This interface will also support DSSSL specifications and
stylesheet concepts such as those used with HTML and XML
It will provide an enhanced userinterface that allows expression of
the typesetting requirements from a large range of subject areas. Some
examples are listed here The requirements of technical documentation (e.g. offset layout,
change bars, etc) The requirements of academic publishing in the humanities
(critical text editions, etc) The requirements of structural formulas in chemistry Advanced use of the mathematicaltypesetting features of The integration of graphical features, such as shading,
within text the integration of hypertext and other links in online
documents using systems such as HTML, XML and PDF
Special care will be taken to ensure that this interface is
extensible: this will be achieved by use of modular designs
It will provide a more robust authorinterface. For example,
artificial restrictions on the nesting of commands will be removed
Error handling will be improved by adding
a more effective, interactive help system
It will provide access to arbitrary fonts from any family (such as
the PostScript and TrueType fonts) including a wide range of fonts for
multilingual documents and the specialist glyphs required by
documents in various technical and academic areas
The new interfaces will be documented in detail and the
system will provide extensive catalogues of examples, carefully
designed to make the learning time for new users (both designers and
authors) as short as possible
The code itself will be thoroughly documented and it will be
designed on modular principles Thus the system will be easy to
maintain and to enhance
The resulting new will, like the present version, be usable
with any standard system (or whatever replaces it) and so will
be freely available on a wide range of platforms documentation
A complete description of Standard can be found in:
: A Document Preparation System
Leslie Lamport, Addison Wesley, 2nd ed, 1994The Companion
Goossens, Mittelbach and Samarin, Addison Wesley, 1994
A recent addition to the publications closely associated with the
project is:
The Graphics Companion
Goossens, Mittelbach and Rahtz, Addison Wesley, 1997
This distribution comes with documentation on several aspects
of of the system The newer features of the system are described in
the following documents:
LaTeXe for authors
describes the new features of documents,
in the file usrguide.tex;
LaTeXe for class and package writers
describes how to produce classes and packages,
in the file clsguide.tex;
LaTeXe font selection
describes the new features of fonts for
class and package writers,
in the file fntguide.tex
For further contacts and sources of information on and
, see the addresses on PagecontactsThe 3 Project Fundfund
Although may be distributed freely, the production and
maintenance of the system does require expenditure of reasonably large
sums of money There are many necessities that need substantial
financing: examples are new or enhanced computing equipment and travel
to team meetings (the volunteers come from many different countries,
so getting together occasionally is a nontrivial exercise)
This is why we are appealing to you for contributions to the fund
Any sum will be much appreciated; the amount need not be large as
small contributions add up to very useful amounts Contributions of
suitable equipment and software will also be of great value This
appeal is both to you as an individual author and to you as a member
of a group or as an employee: please encourage your department or your
employer to contribute towards sustaining our work
We should like to see funded projects that make considerable use of
(e.g. conferences and research teams who use it to publish
their work, and electronic research archives using it) include
contributions to this fund in their budgets
We are also asking commercial organisations to assess the benefits
they gain from using, or distributing, a wellsupported and
to make appropriate contributions to the fund in order that we can
continue to maintain and improve the product If you work for, or do
business with, such an organisation, please bring to the attention of
the relevant people the existence and needs of the project
In particular, we ask that all the large number of organisations and
businesses that distribute , within other software or as part
of a CDROM collection, should consider pricing all products containing
at a level that enables them to make regular donations to the
fund from the profit on these items We also ask all authors and
publishers of books about to consider donating part of the
royalties to the fund
Contributions should be sent to one of the following addresses:
addrs Users Group, P.O. Box 2311, Portland, OR972082311 USA
Fax:15032233960 Email: tugtug.org
UK TUG, 1 Eymore Close, Selly Oak, Birmingham B294LB UK
Fax: 44 121 476 2159 Email: uktugenquiriestex.ac.uk
Cheques should be payable to the user group (TUG or UKTUG) and be
clearly marked as contributions to the 3 fund
Many thanks to all of you who have contributed in the past and thanks
in advance for your generosity in the futureContacts and informationcontacts
In addition to the sources mentioned above, has its home page
on the World Wide Web at:
http:www.latexproject.org
This page describes and the 3 project, and contains
pointers to other resources, such as the user guides, the
Frequently Asked Questions, and the bugs database
More general information, including contacts for local User Groups,
can be accessed via:
http:www.tug.org
The electronic home of anything related is the Comprehensive
Archive Network (CTAN) This is a network of cooperating ftp
sites, with over a gigabyte of material:
ftp:cam.ctan.orgtexarchiveftp:dante.ctan.orgtexarchiveftp:tug.ctan.orgtexarchive
For more information, see the home page